


look alive (move)

by themikeymonster



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bad Headspaces, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Gorey Imagery, Introspection, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy fixation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 00:07:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12376902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themikeymonster/pseuds/themikeymonster
Summary: he unmakes, he remakes, he is more construct than a man--semi-canonical coda toset the spiral in motion





	look alive (move)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [set the spiral in motion](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12254610) by [themikeymonster](https://archiveofourown.org/users/themikeymonster/pseuds/themikeymonster). 



> this is not necessary canon to set the spiral in motion, but it's not necessarily _not,_ either? One might consider this the underlying psychological battle Bucky's engaged in, that his conscious mind persists unaware of. This actually started as I was writing a second part to spiral. because i desperately need these idiots to kiss and be soft together. 
> 
> this fic is not soft.

* * *

The thing is, between the Serum and what HYDRA did to him - the training, the programming - Bucky doesn't think he can die. It isn't that he thinks he  _ can't _ die, it's not as if they made him immortal or anything crazy like that. If his head were to get taken off, or his organs removed, or maybe all his blood - that would probably do it. 

God. Those first couple of years, they hadn't been trying hard to keep him alive, so Bucky's pretty sure it'll take something extreme like that. 

He's pretty sure, but he doesn't  _ know, _ is the thing - the terrifying thing about it. He came out the other side of some stuff that he can't even acknowledge - can't even talk to his therapist about. The cryo and the missions- well, that's easy stuff. Bucky hates the cold, and his arm draws it right into his very  _ bones, _ and it's not easy to talk about, but it's still easier than the rest of it. 

They call him a 'brainwashed assassin' and  _ God, yes, sure, _ he goes along with it, he accepts those labels and makes them his own. He prefers them, honestly - they take the teeth out of the truth of the matter. 'Brainwashed' is a weirdly sanitary term for what happened to him. If he says it often enough, he'll begin to believe it. Stark says something about how human memory can be unreliable - "Witness testimony, too," - and so Bucky applies himself to it. There's no straightening out what happened to him outside of what documentation they've managed to find, he'll never know for sure, so he begins to concoct an alternate reality where the worst thing that ever happened to him was them sticking him in a chair and zapping his brain with electricity until he resets to factory default settings. 

He still thinks of himself this way sometimes. Sometimes he puts the collars of his jackets into his mouth and bites down. Sometimes he's too aware of electrical sockets. Downed power lines. Generators. Cigar lighter sockets in cars. A lot of the times, he wants it - the reset. The Asset. Everything is easier when he's the Asset. Easier but for how the world gets  _ worse _ because he's being used for ill intentions, even if he doesn't know it at the time. He wants it, but he can't in good conscience allow for it. 

And if he can't stop existing,  _ thinking, _ feeling,  _ remembering _ by becoming the Asset, then after that the only other option is death. 

So yes, Bucky is plenty suicidal. It'd been a large concern for his therapist for a long time - kept him off the field, while Steve argued that they could  _ trust _ Bucky since the triggers had been pried, bloody-ripping-wet like flesh, from his mind. Bucky's therapist never once says why, just that Bucky couldn't be put into combat situations. 

He'd done his own studying after his therapist had pointed it out. He's not sure he even experiences suicidal urges the way normal people do. It's not as if he fantasizes about the myriad of ways it could happen. He's good with a knife. Quick. Pain doesn't register on the same scale for him as other people, partially because the arm. Partially because the brain damage. 

It's just that every time he closes his eyes - even so much as blinks - it's a small tragedy that they open again. 

He thinks about it, though. Doesn't fantasize about it, at least he doesn't think so; it's clinical. Cold. The same way he considers taking the lives of those around him. Any of the weaponry he has can be used against him. Anti-tank guns. Missiles. They can be aimed at his face. If the knife is good enough, he can force it, crack it through his ribs and rip out his own heart. He's resolute. Determined. 

But he's trained, too. Disciplined. Bucky Barnes wants to die, but the machinery of his body just continues to chug along, implacable. Unceasing. 

 

If, in Siberia, he could have let Stark kill him, he would have. He had tried to give Stark the motivation, when the opportunity presented itself. Steve couldn't - wouldn't - would rather die.  _ Stark _ though, Stark could have - would have - wanted to. But the training had taken over, and when his escape route had been cut off, the training made him turn against the threat. 

But Stark. Stark came pretty close to it. For one blessed moment, Bucky thought he might have died - his mind whited out in a mixture of delirium and something he thinks might have been bliss.

After waking up from that, he'd begged for cryostasis. Of course Steve, who would give his own life for Bucky's, wouldn't let him die. Between the programming, the serum, and Steve, Bucky had felt driven to giving the knife a try, and couldn't. Couldn't. Couldn't. He hadn't had his arm at the time. 

These days, he sometimes tries to create an alternate reality where he'd been trying to give Stark peace in that bunker. Only sometimes does he bother attempting it; he knows Stark now, and Stark isn't the kind that's so easily appeased. It's not that Stark would feel guilty, because while Stark feels guilt about a lot of things, it's not the men he's killed with his own hands, Bucky thinks. It's the unintended consequences that agonize Stark: the collateral damage. 

 

Maybe that's where all this started: when Bucky, not meaning to but unable to do otherwise, susses out that Stark  _ cares _ about the damage done. It's not just his organizations and charities footing the bill and organizing relief. It's trying to prevent excess damage from occurring in the first place. 

Bucky had been used like a weapon for seventy years - when he was lucky and his handlers clever, he was used as a precision tool, a sniper rifle. When he was unlucky, which was most of the time, they used him like a nail bomb. In either case, they'd never been overly concerned about the fallout. And the order had always been  _ no witness left alive. _

Sometimes he thinks that Stark knows this truth about him - that he thinks of Bucky like a weapon, something inanimate and incapable of acting upon his own thoughts and desires. And then it happens. A weird, trembling-yawning-yearning hunger twists wide open in the place that Bucky's heart should be, like rot at an exponential rate that hollows him out. 

When he thinks about  _ factory default settings, _ sometimes, he thinks of neat, clean, precise lines of three-piece suits that costs more than he's ever been paid in his  _ life, _ of firm, confident engineer hands and words that twist like little knives. Too small to do real damage, but more than enough to rip open something that would hurt for a long time afterwards, if the target was exact. 

And their wielder is incredibly exact - painstaking with his math. If those knives miss, then they were only warning shots. 

Sometimes the Asset thinks that a guy like Stark knows how best to use a weapon without making it a tool for war. Spent plenty of time making those. Should know how to do  _ better. _ Sometimes he thinks if  _ anyone _ knows the words - even Steve - they'll be nothing but so much  _ blood and crackling bone  _ by the time the Asset is done with them. Bucky might not have a choice in the matter - a different kind of not-choice than the one the words give him. 

It's not always that bad. Sometimes he buys into his own artificially created alternate universe, where the worst thing that HYDRA did to him was zap him with electricity, give him a gun, and point him in a direction. A guy can come back from that kind of thing. 

Sometimes he desperately wants to come back. 

 

Sometimes.

  
  
  
  


 

"I think you should consider the possibility that your preoccupation with Tony Stark stems from embodying him as the face of all the Winter Soldier's victims," his therapist says.

But that implies that he feels guilt, which isn't quite right. 

  
  
  
  


 

It's dangerous, getting close to Stark, Bucky knows this. He finds himself doing it anyway, and out of their mutual desire to cause the least amount of friction, it works out. It only takes a few tense moments, a hundred ill tempered words snapped, a dozen lines drawn, and then: neither Stark nor Bucky tread on them. Which is. Interesting. That's what Bucky had thought about it. 

According to Steve, Stark doesn't know what a line is and if you try to show him one, he'll set it on fire and dance on the ashes and be several miles beyond where it used to be before you can blink. He isn't wrong. Bucky watches Stark do it time and time again, brazenly acknowledging that someone is trying to set boundaries and then decide that they don't apply to  _ him. _ Watches Stark decide they do, but he's going across them anyway just to see what happens. 

But not with Bucky. With Bucky, Stark watches, eyes all narrow and sharp and dark and pitiless, while he draws lines - not in sand, because sand is mutable, but in broken asphalt in a hot shower of sparks. Bucky doesn't have a lot of lines that he cares about being crossed, but the few he does have are important. Stark looks at them, this way and that, determines the edges of them and promptly ignores them - as if whatever is behind them  _ doesn't exist. _ Less than no-man's-land: imaginary, impossible. 

Stark doesn't draw lines in the sand either - they're electric. Fluorescent. Photons vibrating with energy. Some are drawn in fire and blood. A few in the white-hot light that sheared off Bucky's arm. Stark's lines aren't mutable, but some he'll withhold punishment for. Others are absolute. Only Steve has survived crossing one of those, and even then only barely. 

Bucky's training won't let Stark kill him, so he steers clear of them. 

Or he  _ thought _ he'd been steering clear of them, anyway. Up until that fight the week before last, in which Iron Man engaged and they'd gotten separated from the others. Bucky had been having a 'good day' - he usually does when he has a chance to fight with the Avengers. There's nothing regimented about the utter chaos they deliver upon their enemies, the constant bickering over comms - one-liners and quips and jokes and taunts - and Bucky is never fighting alone, not leading a group of breakable people. It's not fun, exactly, but it makes Bucky - lighter. 

Bucky thinks sharing body heat is a perfectly fine idea. He's done it plenty of times - he thinks. He's pretty sure. With parents, with siblings, with Steve who is basically a sibling. Out on the war front. Lots of that out on the war front, not just because comfort was spare, but also because sometimes it was the only way to make the screaming in your head  _ stop. _ To forget about the blood for a while. People's heads bursting open, the rifle barking, hot, his hands numbed from the kick of it. 

The memories are there. Bucky reconstructs realities where they matter, where they have meaning and it's not just a picture show behind eyelids, not just a guidebook for interactions between people for him to ape. Touch and body heat. Camaraderie. Iron Man as a team mate, something like a fellow soldier, like foreign soldiers, like the enemy. Memories of even then: James Barnes killed without flinching, without tears, and then for a while with tears, then for a while would try to soothe dying soldiers, then would try to put them out of their misery, and then merely put them down as he came upon them. 

James Barnes was already a terror upon the field by the time that HYDRA got their hands on him. It's why they chose him in particular. The shape was already there, just waiting for something to be hung upon it, and so they striped him to pieces and arranged skin and hair and tendon and bone  _ just so, _ and then never touched him again. 

It's like hot water after cryo, touch is. Necessary, desirous, but also wretched. Loathsome. It's the same kind of feeling he'd had when Steve had first caught up with him, had persisted until Bucky let him put his hands on him and drag him down against his shoulder, grasp desperate and yearning. 

Decades without anyone daring to come close enough to  _ touch him _ because even under their best efforts, the Soldier still lashed out at random, and a kind touch is like torment. A torment that he needs more than he needs his sanity, but one he struggles to endure. 

Like other torments, he gradually becomes capable of withstanding it - coping with it. Eventually, Bucky manages to create a reality where it doesn't open a vast, consuming scream in his skull. First Steve who, with reckless abandon, throws himself rashly at the Asset's mercy even when half the time it ends with busted faces and broken bones. Then, once relatively certain of his own safety, Sam had stepped in, wary with elbow nudges and shoulder bumps, then hands, and eventually falling asleep on his shoulder. Natasha, warier still than even that. Careful brushes with barely even fingertips at the peripherals, along Bucky's wrists or his ankles if his feet were propped up.

None of the other teammates had dared come close enough for even that. Which. Smart of them. 

He'd been thinking about survival, about making it through the storm without provoking the part of him that is more  _ construct _ than man (the Asset is mostly construct and only barely man, honestly; more weapon than soldier). He'd been feeling good - felt more like Bucky, maybe, if he could remember what that felt like. He'd known the cold would remind him of cryostasis, and - then it would be a bad day. The fabricated realities he has carefully constructed would unravel and he would start to rot from the inside out, skin and hair and bone on a frame not his own. 

They can not unravel while he is in a small, enclosed space with Stark. He doesn't know what might happen. Maybe nothing. Maybe blood. Something worse than unraveling, Bucky or Stark or both, perhaps. 

Somehow, it seems natural for Stark to be the first person that Bucky  _ invites  _ to touch him - insists touches him. 

  
  
  


 

Bucky must not have steered nearly as clear as he thought of Stark's boundary lines, armed with lasers and electrified, because -

 

Stark is  _ (soft, sweet, like quick kisses performed just out of sight, music and hushed laughter, the lovely curve of a lower back where his hand fits just so) _ like a scalpel. His edges keep getting sharpened, again and again, and if you give something wounded a weapon, that weapon will be used. He eases his weight down on Bucky's right side and  _ slices him wide open _ so neat and so easy, he almost doesn't feel it. With wounds that are big enough, devastating enough, shock can do that - and then, as with shock, he begins to rattle and shake. It's a different kind of cold.

It feels a bit like that: violent and wet. Hemorrhaging out across tile, twitching limbs, gasping breaths. 

 

Bucky Barnes can't die. No one has been able to kill him in seventy years, despite their best efforts. His keepers had never been careful when they'd learned long before that there was never any need to be, and when Bucky has the choice, neither is he. He isn't, and isn't, and is so very tired every time he opens his eyes. He asks for cryo, which is then denied, and then they cut-and-slice-and-rip his excuses from his heart, his brains, sore and aching bright. When he sobs, broken and bereft for it, they pet him with soft, cruel hands and shush him silent. 

They keep using him however they like, and the seventy years behind him stretches out into eighty, ninety, one hundred ahead of him where there will be no rest. He realizes they'll never allow him to rest. Because they won't, the training won't - the programming. He'll have to gradually become capable of withstanding it. He tries so hard to construct realities he can live with, live within, or at least  _ survive- _ tries to create Bucky and erase the tired, violated thing that decays, sick-sweet and hollow inside, and then - 

 

Without a bit, without even a chair, Stark slices him open on his sharpened edges, reaches inside his rotting chest, and squeezes: ozone, iron, salt - photons, fire, blood and electricity.

And awakens within him the sudden hot, wrenching hunger to  _ thrive. _

 

* * *

 

**Author's Note:**

> That whole last part was entirely metaphorical, before anyone becomes concerned. 
> 
> Honestly, my preference with winteriron is well adjusted and fluff, but I think this take is a lot more likely take given what Bucky's been through, even with the serum - if he remembers everything. i love unhealthy relationships and violent, brutal imagery, but the meaner canon is to my faves, the more I want their fictional lives to be perfect lmao.  
> Parts of it recall [Choices, Consequences](http://archiveofourown.org/works/9999503), specifically Bucky _wanting_ the chair; the idea that the torture Bucky endured was worse than what we saw came from [this isn't violence, this is just a war in my head](https://archiveofourown.org/works/8262905/). 
> 
> \- [False Memory Syndrome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory_syndrome) \- "one third of experimental subjects could become convinced that they experienced things in childhood that had never really occurred—even highly traumatic, and impossible events"  
> \- [Why EyeWitness Testimony is unreliable](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/) \- "Even questioning by a lawyer can alter the witness’s testimony because fragments of the memory may unknowingly be combined with information provided by the questioner, leading to inaccurate recall."  
> \- i didn't mention it last fix, but both titles reference [Move](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xGnSqHpHA-0) by Saint Motel


End file.
